Chris Selley’s Full Pundit: Who’s up for a public inquiry?

Paging John GomeryJust how bad could the Robocon scandal get for Stephen Harper’s Tories?

“We do not know for a fact that the [robo-calls] came from anyone acting on the authority of the Conservative party,” Postmedia’s Andrew Coynemuses. “But, well, let’s say it fits a pattern — if not of outright lawbreaking then certainly of close-to-the-wind tactics and ends-justify-the-means ethics.” Exactly. What happened was disgusting; as Coyne says, people ought to go to jail and hopefully will. But the Conservatives need not just to get to the bottom of this. They need to realize, as Coyne says, that even if this was one rogue campaign worker, this brand of crap is very likely to be the party’s eventual undoing.

Lawrence Martin, writing for iPolitics, compiles an exhaustive catalogue of Conservative misdeeds — clip and save for future use! — that, as per Coyne, inspires no confidence that the Tories’ “hands are clean.” Frankly, though, it’s so exhaustive that many of its components simply have no place in a discussion about Robocon. We’re one step away from someone using actual violence or intimidation to keep Canadians away from the polls. We fail to see how the puffin that pooped on Stéphane Dion’s head fits into this discussion, even as part of a “pattern.” (Also, let’s face it: The puffin was funny, and the freakout over it was ridiculous.)

The Toronto Star’s editorialists, likewise, are perfectly willing to accept that Harper knew nothing of Robocon, just so long as he realizes that by routinely sanctioning the aforementioned misdeeds, he invited true believers to take things too far. Which is to say, hopefully, to jail.

Postmedia’s Michael Den Tandt doesn’t mince a single word in laying out just how serious this situation is for Canadian democracy, and could end up being for the Conservatives. “Based on the facts now known, this was electoral fraud — focused, organized and widespread. [Interim Liberal leader Bob] Rae did not exaggerate when he called it Nixonian,” says Den Tandt. (True, but we do wish we were grown up enough to deplore political sleaze without mentioning theUnited States.) “To Gomery, or not to Gomery? That is the question,” he says, and he has already made up his mind: “There needs to be a public, arm’s-length judicial investigation.”

We’re not actually convinced of that yet. Adscam was bloody complicated; this is potentially much less so. It seems at least conceivable that Elections Canada and the RCMP, with RackNine’s and the phone companies’ co-operation, could compile a complete record of the dodgy phone calls made, and in the case of the robocalls maybe even their content and the credit card number of the person who paid for them. (Mind you, that looks like the sort of paragraph we’ll revisit in a year and be disappointed.)

Moving on to suddenly less serious Conservative problems, in the Vancouver Sun, Public Safety Minister Vic Toews stands by the government’s controversial online surveillance bill, insists it “creates no new powers to access the content of e-mails, web-browsing history or phone calls” — but is essential nonetheless — and accuses media commentators of not “understanding” the bill correctly. Then, for reasons we cannot fathom, he promises to send his excellent bill straight to committee for “a full examination of potential amendments.” Shome mishtake, surely?

Ontario goes crazyThe National Post’s Matt Gurney finds it a tad disappointing that not only did a Kitchener, Ont., public school, the Ontario Provincial Police Waterloo Regional Police Service [apologies for the error -ed] and the local child services concern operate “on the principle of zero tolerance, zero thinking, zero discretion” in arresting a man whose four-year-old daughter drew a picture of him fighting monsters with a gun, but are now insisting they did the right thing. Y’all self-evidently didnot do the right thing. And here’s a free tip for police forces, in the face of a mounting credibility crisis they seem bound and determined to ignore: Maybe dial down the strip-searches?

Sun Media’s Ezra Levant zeroes in on a telling quote from a child services official: “From a public safety point of view, any child drawing a picture of guns and saying there’s guns in a home would warrant some further conversation with the parents and child.” Um … why? AsLevant says, guns aren’t illegal.

The Star’s Rosie DiManno files another withering attack on the Toronto Police Association’s finely tuned sense of impunity, and dismisses the idea that charging a cop with murder will make others hesitate in key situations. “I cannot recall a single incident over the past 30 years … of a cop second-guessing his own response to a heart-thumping situation out of pre-emptive concern that he will need to justify it,” she argues. Besides which, she says “judges, juries, certainly the SIU [Special Investigations Unit], always take into after-the-fact account the circumstances in which an officer has used lethal force. Doubts invariably favour the cops.”

The Globe and Mail’s Marcus Gee comments on Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s nascent re-election campaign, in which it seems he and Brother Doug plan to parlay City Council’s refusal to back their fantasy subway vision into an even more widespread and unstoppable suburban revolution — possibly aided by Doug’s presence as a Member of Provincial Parliament at Queen’s Park. Before you ask: Yes, the election is in 2014. How, Gee asks, do they plan to get anything through Council if they’re just “beating their chests, waving a club and ranting on talk radio”?

Foreign affairsThe Globe’s Doug Saunders argues that the International Criminal Court lost much of its gravitas under outgoing chief prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo, because his insistence on “threatening leaders with trials” had the perverse effect of “keeping those leaders in power longer” (which is quite possibly the case in Syria), and because he was willing to accept referrals from the UN Security Council, such as with Muammar Gadhaffi, even when it (the UNSC) wasn’t really interested in seeing the suspects in question prosecuted.

Conrad Black, writing in the Post, entertainingly eviscerates both the presidency of Barack Obama (“a regime of narcissistic posturing and confidence tricks and bad policy options that richly deserves and badly needs a severe thrashing”) and all remaining Republican candidates to replace him. It’s time to go off the board, in his view. “If Obama loses, it will be because the Republicans jump the rails on this corrupt, farcical nominating process and draft a serious candidate on a serious platform.”

Duly notedIn the Ottawa Citizen, Andrew Potter suggests it’s a bit much for people to get all grossed out by the idea of meat grown in a test tube, which has no ethical implications, when we are so “divorced from the animal origins of our food,” and would likely be disgusted if we acquainted ourselves with them. That’s a fair point, although he loses us when he jumps aboard a philosophical argument over whether livestock are, in fact, “animals,” and whether, “if they are animals, then perhaps we should stop eating them.” When cheetahs stop eating impalas, we’ll talk.